Alternatives to the draw system

[-wyvern]

I'd like to get this straight off my chest - I wanted to like FFVIII. Really. It just was (for me anyway) an extremely tedious experience because a large part of it involved scouring the world for rare enemies and then spending half an hour drawing magic from them. I can understand where the designers were coming from, ie if you want a specific type of magic you have to risk being killed by the monster if you get too greedy and try and extract too much of it. But in many cases, you could spend all day repeatedly bashing the X button without needing to cure once. This isn't a rant, though. I liked the idea of junctioning magic to get stronger, it just could have been handled better. I think they could have done on of two things:

Made it so that each monster has a limited stock of magic. You can draw it, and if you are weak you might get less of it than if you are stronger (and run a high risk of you getting killed) but there would be no tedious monster camping.

Done a system whereby you got a lot with the first draw, but the next ones were consecutively less effective (something like each draw yielding a third of the one before it). This means that if you are sufficiently pedantic you could draw all the magic out of the monster, but it would be more efficient (and more fun) to go out and find new creatures to draw from. This has the added bonus of encouraging the characters to explore.

Any other ideas? I'm not exactly sure what purpose this speculation serves (what with the game being about eight years old or something) but there you are. It's something to ponder over.

[Lehteb]

Eight? not hardly, maybe 4 or 5 years old

I liked Draw, and i will admit it could have been handled better, but i was really impressed with Square coming up with something new like that.

[TasteyPies]

Draw was teh sexxors, free magic 24/7 no random battling to save up for spells. Besides its good way to stop cheaters from using hacks for money and buying superhigh level spells.

[Kirobaito]

Besides its good way to stop cheaters from using hacks for money and buying superhigh level spells.

I'm sure there are hacks that give you 100 of every magic.

[Peegee]

There are gameshark codes for infinite items, spells (magic), pie, and ribbons.

[Mo-Nercy]

Well, after about 5 hours into the game, you tend to start refining magic more than directly drawing it. You can also get magic by drawing from random draw points.

I say the Magic system was perfect. Square designed it so that you couldn't get that much magic in the beginning but by the end you could refine all kinds of magic to super power your characters. If Square made it less tedious to get 100 stocked magic, it would make the game dreadfully easy.

[blue_midget192]

i think twas a good thing. but it is kinda annoying haveing to sit there for ages rying to draw 100 magic from sumthing in order to try adn make ur party stronger. thing is i cant think of any alternative either so i'l sshh *sshhes*

[-wyvern]

The thing is with refining is it's all very fine and splendid, except for a few major problems, game balance wise. One of the most glaring is that a tent refines into ten curagas using sirens L magic RF. When junctioned to HP, 100 curagas give a score in excess of 3000, which I feel is a little excessive when the next character has about 600 HP to play with. They needed to look at the refining system in a little more detail.

[Carnage]

I like how you can get magic from enemies 24/7. I didnt like FF8 at first but now im addicted.

[Lord Xehanort]

Refining made drawing obsolete.

Card Mod, [insert name]Mag-Ref, Junction to your favorite stats.

And the Island Closest to Hell's Draw Points helped too.

[DJZen]

I thought the junction system (and that includes drawing) made the game enjoyable. I didn't like the plot at all (Seifer was probably the most interesting character to me), but after I learned the gameplay I just went crazy and had lots of fun with it. I thought drawing was really tedious at first too, but then I stopped making people use magic all the time. I tend to assign "jobs" to characters rather than trying to make them all superpowerful (everyone really good at their own thing instead of everyone sorta good at everything), which for me translated to making Squall powerful, Zell good at taking hits, and Rinoa got to use magic. Because of that, I'd have everyone draw anytime I got the chance, and only Rinoa really needed to worry about keeping her para magic well stocked, but even then not really because it's just that easy to come by. Only the "forbidden" magics (Holy, Ultima, etc.) were actually difficult to get, but that was still no problem. Well... I just didn't use that magic a lot. I save those for big fights and wound up not really using them until about disc 3.

In conclusion I only found drawing somewhat tedious, and found the rest of the game made it well worth it.

[PhoenixAsh]

I always get confused by people who say draw is boring. I always find it more fun to find an enemy with the spell I want, draw the spells I want, then equip it in the way I want, over find hardest enemy, attack, level up, repeat.

As for refining items making it easy to get strong, well thats hardly a bad thing. I don't see many people picking up the game and mastering the whole system in a few minutes. An experienced player on the other hand can enter the game and become damn strong without having to exploit any bugs within a few hours. This makes me like the game over a lot of other FFs, it rewards good players over patient ones.